Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to remote health monitoring and, more particularly, to a telecare and/or telehealth communication method and a system for providing remote health monitoring.
Health monitoring of elderly individuals or patients released from hospital in their homes is getting more and more important as hospitals are often overcrowded, too far or too expensive on a long term basis. Many attempts have been made in the past in order to facilitate remote health care of elderly people, and to suggest methods and systems for providing health monitoring data for care givers at different levels from medical specialists, through health care personnel to family members. The ultimate goal would be to ease the burden of the health- and social-care systems as well as improve quality of life of such individuals needing assistance in their homes.
These individuals are usually elder people, usually having a chronic condition, sometimes neurological diseases, who have difficulties using new technologies and are usually suffering from perceived loneliness. They usually have a long term medication, and simultaneously health-related data have to be collected, stored and evaluated in order to provide the required telecare and telehealth services. The measurements, required by the health-related data acquisition, are in most of the cases performed by the patients, without any supervision.
It is extremely important to get and maintain motivation in repeating activities, especially when the repeating activities are useful but unpleasant or boring. It is also extremely challenging to get the elder population and those with chronic neurological diseases interested in and committed to new technologies used in telecare and telehealth. Sometimes initially, the user is interested in the new technologies but becomes bored due to the predictability of the communication with the telecare/telehealth devices.
From psychological point of view, the most effective solution to familiarize the elderly with the new systems is the personalization of the parts and services of the system which are used as communication interface, e.g. the communicator center of the system (also called home hub or health monitoring control unit or subsystem control unit). There are plenty of available technologies for personalization of a computational device, and the amount of applicable innovation is growing: for example videoconferencing or reminder messages are already used in some telemedicine systems, however these technologies rely on human-to-human communication. A telemedicine system consisting of a remote center configured to examine a patient, communicating with a diagnostic center, and enabling a doctor to provide medical care via video conference is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/022,566 (Method and device for administering health care remotely, to Chun Hsien Chiang et al.). U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/228,034 (Method and device for administering health care remotely, to Chun Hsien Chiang et al.) describes a remote health-monitoring system and method for the remote monitoring and supervision of outpatient vital signs using videoconferencing techniques.
Other developments focus on solutions based on man-machine communication. U.S. Pat. No. 5,339,821 suggests for example a home medical system and medical apparatus for use therewith, which gives a patient instructions via display and sound messages. This sound is only indicative for the presence of a new message to be read by the patient. U.S. Pat. No. 6,510,962 describes a programmable automatic pill dispenser, which already uses human voice messages to give instructions to a patient. U.S. Pat. No. 6,537,214 suggests to use messages in the native language and dialect spoken, where the monitoring takes place. U.S. Pat. No. 5,917,414 suggests to select the voice of a relative or a friend. U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,238 proposes a health support system that uses two-way communication between the patient and the care providing system and finally U.S. Pat. No. 5,646,912 describes a medication compliance, coordination and dispensing system which has I/O devices for visual and audible alarms for alerting the patient of administration times, voice and display means for providing extended medication information to the patient and a mini camera for recording patient compliance.
Most of the prior art methods and systems provide only limited communication possibilities which are far from conventional human-human communication. Nor the voice or the video communication can be as effective as the human-to-human communication, which however is in most cases not applicable because of the above mentioned reasons.
Research has shown the importance of non-verbal communication in patient-doctor interaction as described in “Studies of doctor-patient interaction”, Annual Reviews Public Health, (1989) 10: 163-80 by D. L. Roter and J. A. Hall. The tonal or other features of vocal communication have been assessed: correlation has been found between doctors' voice quality and their success in referring the patients to treatment. It has been also demonstrated that the particular vocal affects expressed when talking about patients are reflected in clinicians' talk to the same patients, and also that a physician's voice tone relates various patient effects. In another study physicians' abilities to express emotions through the face and voice and to decode the meanings of nonverbal cues of the face and voice have been shown to be related to both patient satisfaction and appointment keeping compliance. Although it is not yet known exactly how these nonverbal skills are put to use in the medical visit, it is clear that they play an important role.
Research has also shown that people vary in their ability to send and receive non-verbal communication signs so it is important to have a personalized system when using non-verbal communication signs.
Due to the imperfection of the prior art methods and systems, there is a continuous need for providing a machine-to-human communication which comes as near as possible to the human-to-human communication and which is less expensive than human-to-human communication and more acceptable than the prior and present man-machine communication systems.